May 03, 2006

Coming attractions...

I haven't been slacking, honest...

Things are very hectic round here, in a good way. The redundancy seems more and more like a blessing, since I really need to be able to devote most of my time to my writing projects. That said, I am going to need some sort of regular income, so I am on the look-out for some part-time teaching in the next academic year, preferably HE. If anyone out there knows of anything suitable in the London area, let me know... I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking... You can see why they made me redundant, can't you, I'm nowhere near flexible enough...

My two trips to the East Coast over the last couple of weekends have been incredibly inspiring. (One of the - entirely positive - problems I have at the moment is a kind of inspiration glut actually....) The initial fruit of this will be a long post on Weird Suffolk which will be about (amongst other Things) East Anglia's crucial role in the development of weird fiction...

The whole weird fiction line has led me back to The Fall, whom I've been wanting to write about for years, without ever having the angle which would do them justice. So expect a post on The Fall as pulp modernism in the next few days. The long-promised Gothic Nightmares/ Nigel Cooke post is also a few sentences away from completion. As is a post on Ripley and Glam, which will tie together themes from my 'Ethics of Glam' project with ideas from the book on Highsmith that I.T. and I are planning.

Just so this post isn't entirely promissory, I do want to make a few further remarks about subjective destitution. At the Lenin's Tomb/k-punk/Infinite Thought/Savanorola/Messures Taken summit meeting last week, Bat argued that the V for Vendetta version of subjective destitution was closer to the fascist, rather than the leftitst model, because the destitution is something violently imposed upon Evey by what is, in effect, an authority figure. I agree that the film's presentation of subjective destitution is highly problematic, but it is important to stress that the subjective destitution is not something that V does to Evey. Subjective destitution is not equivalent to debasement (even though, as Savanorola pointed out in the same conversation, there has been a strong tendency to 'image' subjective destitution in terms of female debasement). You can be debased without relinquishing your identity, just as you can relinquish your identity without being debased. Evey's subjective destitution happens only when she makes the choice not to identify with what she had previously thought of as herself. The problem - and it arises from the film's central failure to deal with the impersonality of capitalist power - is that there is no need for the agent of ontological change, the analyst/activist who exposes the way in which power constructs reality and identity, also to be a torturer. The agonies of subjective destitution are caused by giving up the comfortable-but-damaging identifications which make you suffer in the first place - in the case of analysis, it might initially seem to the patient that the analyst is attacking them, undermining them, when the aim is to break the connection between the patient and what is making them sick.

There is no need to subject people in capitalism to additional suffering; the point is to get them to recognize that the suffering they are already undergoing is caused by capitalism. Hence my continual harping on about mental illness. The vast numbers of people who suffer some kind of mental illness under capitalism can either think, 'there is some failing with me, if only I could fit into this system better, if only I were working harder, if only I could enjoy these empty pleasures more, then things would be OK' OR 'the problem is with the system that is making me ill...' People already have their heads shaved in psychiatric wards, dope themselves up on multinational-pushed prescription zombile pills, or cut themselves ... the point must be to politicize this, to bring about an ontological reframing...

Owen's comments on dis-identity also raise a number of important issues. There is a sense in which certain types of identity politics are already dis-identifying in what you 'are' - or what you experience yourself as - is no longer a natural given. You re-encounter yourself now as a member of a group embedded in a contingent social antagonism. I would still argue, thought, that the temptation here is to think that there are some actual positive predicates, some agalma, which your ethnos possesses as of right rather than as a structural effect of that antagonism. At the same time, I can perfectly well see that the identitarian move is a step - perhaps an indispensable one in some cases - towards dis-identitying universalism (Malcolm X remains an exemplary case of someone for whom separatism functioned in this way).